Lenovo Tech World: 5 Biggest Product, Software Launches

‘It’s all about using AI to build a smarter future together for all,’ Lenovo Chairman and CEO Yuanqing Yang said in kicking off the show this week. ‘Lenovo believes that AI is real. It’s not another fleeting trend. It’s not an inflated bubble. AI is already improving the lives of individuals, improving productivity for enterprises and creating a more sustainable planet.’

Lenovo Tech World brought in liquid-cooled servers that run Nvidia GB200s with 30 percent less electricity, Meta AI models that run locally on laptops in airplane mode, and wow-inducing, glasses-free 3-D monitors.

“It’s all about using AI to build a smarter future together for all,” Lenovo Chairman and CEO Yuanqing Yang (pictured) said in kicking off the show Tuesday. “Lenovo believes that AI is real. It’s not another fleeting trend. It’s not an inflated bubble. AI is already improving the lives of individuals, improving productivity for enterprises and creating a more sustainable planet.”

In separate appearances throughout the day, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su each walked on stage and talked about the creation of their new x86 ecosystem advisory board, aimed at advancing the x86 partnership. Lenovo is a founding member of that partnership as well.

Nvidia Chairman and CEO Jensen Huang also made an appearance to talk about Lenovo’s Hybrid AI offering developed with Nvidia and its liquid-cooled servers.

The show kicked off with a lullaby sung by a father who is losing his voice and movement to ALS. Following that, disabilities advocate Erin Taylor, who also has ALS, used an “eyegaze" keyboard developed by Lenovo, and Lenovo’s predictive AI, to introduce Yang to the stage with an AI avatar that speaks with the voice she had before she was diagnosed.

“This is why Lenovo innovates. This is how we use the power of AI, to preserve the most cherished moments with our loved ones. This is what ‘Smarter AI for All’ means to me,” Yang said.

The show introduced new infrastructure offerings, the Aura series of AI PCs with lightweight aluminum frames and 18 hours battery life that will feature AI agents.

“Private AI, including personal AI and enterprise AI will co-exist with public AI. They complement each other to deliver enhanced outcomes for different customer needs,” Yang said. “Personal AI starts with a personal AI agent. It uses natural interactions to understand the user’s intentions. It also develops information from the user’s personal knowledge base to provide answers and break down the tasks and make the execution fast. … eventually it will become your personal AI twin.”

ThinkSystem SC777 V4 Neptune: ‘That is sexy’

Lenovo’s sixth generation of liquid-cooled servers has an admirer in Nvidia’s Huang, who saw its copper-piped plumbing on stage holding two of his company’s GB200 GPUs.

“That is sexy,” Huang said.

In the bowels of a 1U-sized server, copper tubes are run between copper-cooling plates thick as a deck of cards that bed down the Nvidia GB200s, and eventually get clamped to Parker automotive hoses and dripless connections, which feed water through the system then send it out through the back where it takes a lap to cool off.

It does not need the physical space for air flow that other servers require, and it uses warm water to remove the heat from the servers so nearly all of the electricity that goes into the machine is used for compute, Lenovo said.

“We are viewing this as the best-in-class liquid-cooled solution on the marketplace that takes full advantage of the Grace Blackwell 200,” said Vlad Rozanovich, senior vice president of the Infrastructure Solutions Group at Lenovo. “By going down the path of liquid cooling with Neptune you could actually use 30 percent more power for compute versus 30 percent of your power for cooling.”

Data centers use the “PUE” gauge to measure the power usage effectiveness of servers. The ideal PUE is 1.0, meaning all of the server’s electricity is being used for compute. Lenovo’s air-cooled servers clock in at 1.39 to 1.4. However, Rozanovich said, the “liquid- cooled solutions get all the way down to 1.1 and below.”

Rozanovich said liquid-cooling technology is not new to Lenovo. This is the sixth generation of Neptune servers.

For connectivity, the ThinkSystem SC777 V4 Neptune supports the next-generation Nvidia Quantum-X800 InfiniBand and Spectrum-X800 Ethernet platforms for high-performance accelerated networking. The ThinkSystem SC777 V4 Neptune also supports Nvidia AI Enterprise, a cloud-native software platform that streamlines development and deployment of production-grade AI solutions, including generative AI, computer vision and speech AI.

ThinkSystem N1380 Neptune Server Chassis: ‘It fits through the door and won’t crack the floor’

This liquid-cooled server-chassis design pairs with the Neptune server to scale the SC777V4 Neptune and deliver four dozen GB200s in an industry-standard-size stack.

“Our rhyme of the week is, ‘It fits through the door and it won’t crack the floor,” a Lenovo representative said.

The chassis redesign lets customers run 100-kilowatt server racks without specialized air conditioning. Each rack can hold eight servers. Each server holds two Nvidia GB200 chips. In a full-stack configuration, it can hold 48 chips.

Lenovo had one of the racks on the show floor and demonstrated how the chassis stages the Neptune servers vertically, eight across, so servers slide in similar to networking blades. The connections are all in the back of the rack, so seating the server then plugs it in to a power port, a data port and two dripless hose connections for water cooling. The Parker hoses used to move liquids around are the same used in the guts of F1 race cars, Lenovo said.

As electricity supply emerges as the top bottleneck to the future of the AI data center, Rozanovich said liquid cooling, using lukewarm water to remove 100 percent of the heat from its servers, makes them 30 percent more energy-efficient than air-cooled rivals.

“The [colocation] providers, Digital Realty, Equinix, they see the way they make money is selling compute, not selling cooling,” he said. “And so all of these providers are now starting to come around to say, ‘Hey, what if we start doing some of these liquid-cooling deployments?’”

Aura AI PCs: ‘This is the one I’m carrying in my backpack these days.’

Intel’s Gelsinger is a fan of the new Aura line of Lenovo laptops. He hailed Intel and Lenovo’s advances in delivering “the AI PC era.” He said the two companies teamed up in 2022 and wanted to “redefine that PC experience.”

“From that is the Aura Edition PC,” Gelsinger said on stage. “And this is the one I’m carrying in my backpack these days and starting to use. Incredible battery life. New experiences. Enabling new applications. It wasn’t just that we innovated it together. We co-imagined together.”

Gelsinger cited an IDC forecast that predicts half of the PC market will be AI PCs by the end of next year and they will represent 100 percent of the market by the end of the decade.

“Exceptional performance and battery life. We put to bed that debate of ‘Can you have great performance and battery life?’”

Luca Rossi, Lenovo’s executive vice president and president of the Intelligent Device Group, said 10,000 hours of user insight went into designing the Aura PC with Intel. They packed it into a 1. 35-kilogram aluminum frame and gave it 18 hours of battery life.

“These devices will feel less like tools and more like beautiful extensions of ourselves,” Rossi said. “With the vision of becoming your personal twin over time, be prepared to get more familiar with your AI twin over time. “

AI Now: ‘I can run it in airplane mode’

This is a software layer coming to Lenovo PCs as a download that lets users run Meta’s Llama 3.1 model locally, so even when a device is in airplane mode the user can iterate with Generative AI, use it to find files and adjust PC settings.

Lenovo’s Rossi said AI Now is a digital agent “that knows you, understands you and works for you.”

“It integrates a Meta Llama local model LLM, which provides fast, secure on-device processing, enabling content generation and document management without relying on cloud services,” Rossi said. “AI Now will also assist you in managing your device, help with service inquiries and more and more.”

The app runs in its own window. It can be used to change settings, locate files, open apps and control them. For example, a user could ask it to open the camera app on the PC and take a picture.

During a demonstration on the show floor a Lenovo representative held up one of the company’s AI PCs to show that airplane mode was indeed on and then had it find and summarize a PDF, which it did within a few seconds. The feature works more quickly when it is attached to the internet or with a faster processor.

And it can use pictures and text to iterate. The app uses a Microsoft program to set up guardrails around the use of the model locally.

Lenovo Glasses-Free 3-D Monitor: ‘Wow. OK. Whoa. Wow. ‘

Lenovo’s glasses-free 3-D monitors use cameras to track eye movements to fine-tune the stereoscopic screen to make objects appear in the air between the user and the monitor. The cameras also track a user’s hands, which lets the user grab and turn items in “mid air.”

Lenovo said the ThinkVision 27 3-D Monitor reduces the need for additional computing power for 3-D rendering, while providing a consistent user experience across both 2-D and 3-D modes in 4K.

Models featured at the show had 3-D models queued up and a line of people behind them waiting to try it out. During a press and analyst walkthrough before the show, one user was impressed, saying “Wow. OK. Whoa. Wow” while playing a game.

Another user stood and twisted a model house in the air between himself and the monitor, on the roof, on the side, zoomed in, zoomed out, over and over.